Los Angeles Independent Publishing

New Poems

Jim Tilley

Jim Tilley earned a doctorate in physics from Harvard and worked on Wall Street for twenty years. His first collection of poetry, In Confidence, was published by Red Hen Press in 2011. His poems have been published in literary journals such as Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. He has won the Sycamore Reviews Wabash Prize for Poetry, the New England Poetry Clubs Firman Houghton Award, and an International Publication Award from Atlanta Review. He lives in Bedford Corners, New York.

Los Angeles Independent Publishing

New Poems

Red Hen Press, a Los Angeles independent publisher founded by Kate Gale, is the place for new poems, new fiction, and lesbian fiction/lesbian books.

Books Available:

Lessons from Summer Camp

A fifty-year look backward to the days spent at summer camp and the life lessons they taught us without our knowing it.

In Lessons from Summer Camp, Jim Tilley takes a fifty-year retrospective look at a ten-year period during his childhood and adolescence to discover what summer camp was really about. In both a wistful and an appreciative look back on the days of our youth, the poems reminisce on the memorable events of those summers, from fire-lighting contests at Council Ring, to races in war canoes during Tribal Games, learning to swim, and writing letters home?to the inevitable sadness of departing at the end of the summer, saying goodbyes at the station until next year. The poems evoke memories of experiences we?ve all shared and bring perspective to how Lessons from Summer Camp often become apparent only later in life.

"Jim Tilleys Lessons from Summer Camp would make Wordsworth proud since it is affection recollected in tranquility. Boys leave a ceremonial world of finger sandwiches and afternoon tea to step into a greener and wider one. There Tilley and his friends learn the value and limitations of teamwork and play games that sort out leaders from followers. As sunlit as these poems can be, a prescient and observant Tilley also finds that sometimes life is always a night in the wilderness. On a canoe trip he hears two loons calling, one as if lost, the other answering, Im over here as the author himself searches for his place in the world."

--Ron Koertge

"Reading this book is like returning to those sometimes fraught but mostly carefree days of summer campor, for the uninitiated among us, like taking our blindfolds off and discovering that vivid world for the first time. Tilleys poems are refreshingly direct, maybe because, as he says in J-Stroke and Sweep, You cant see the metaphor when youre a Camper. He sees the metaphors now but doesnt bear down on them too hard, and the lessons of the title never seem forced. Jim Tilley earns a 3rd feather for this third book."

--Jeffrey Harrison

Cruising at Sixty to Seventy: Poems and Essay

Cruising at Sixty to Seventy is the second book from award-winning poet Jim Tilley. In three sections—Dear Wife, Dear Self, Dear Friends—the speaker, a physicist and mathematician by education, now retired from a career on Wall Street, reflects on everyday experience, finding grace and drama in life’s smaller moments. As in Tilley’s debut collection, In Confidence, many poems use ideas, problems, and puzzles from physics and mathematics to explore personal relationships, such as “Particle and Wave,” in which a fundamental concept from quantum mechanics becomes a metaphor for the ripples and collisions on the fabric of family life. The book ends with a personal essay, “The Elegant Solution” (originally published as a Ploughshares Solo), about Tilley’s relationship with his father based on the language of mathematics.

Praise for Jim Tilley's First Book, In Confidence

“Jim Tilley does confide in his readers here as he explores a refreshing variety of subjects—everything from the complexity of father-son and husband-wife relations to the more solvable problems of dark matter and the origins of the cosmos. But what wins our confidence is not his range but his steady hand on the poem and his steady gaze at the world.”

—Billy Collins

“Jim Tilley is a bracing and quietly confident writer, able to consistently surprise us, whether in missives from domestic life, topical poems, or poems which quirkily address what he calls “the big questions.” These are wry, bittersweet, and unobtrusively instructive poems in the tradition of Wilbur, Schuyler, and Dunn, and they are very much worth reading.”

—David Wojahn

Cruising at Sixty to Seventy: Poems and Essay

Cruising at Sixty to Seventy is the second book from award-winning poet Jim Tilley. In three sections—Dear Wife, Dear Self, Dear Friends—the speaker, a physicist and mathematician by education, now retired from a career on Wall Street, reflects on everyday experience, finding grace and drama in life’s smaller moments. As in Tilley’s debut collection, In Confidence, many poems use ideas, problems, and puzzles from physics and mathematics to explore personal relationships, such as “Particle and Wave,” in which a fundamental concept from quantum mechanics becomes a metaphor for the ripples and collisions on the fabric of family life. The book ends with a personal essay, “The Elegant Solution” (originally published as a Ploughshares Solo), about Tilley’s relationship with his father based on the language of mathematics.

Praise for Jim Tilley's First Book, In Confidence

“Jim Tilley does confide in his readers here as he explores a refreshing variety of subjects—everything from the complexity of father-son and husband-wife relations to the more solvable problems of dark matter and the origins of the cosmos. But what wins our confidence is not his range but his steady hand on the poem and his steady gaze at the world.”

—Billy Collins

“Jim Tilley is a bracing and quietly confident writer, able to consistently surprise us, whether in missives from domestic life, topical poems, or poems which quirkily address what he calls “the big questions.” These are wry, bittersweet, and unobtrusively instructive poems in the tradition of Wilbur, Schuyler, and Dunn, and they are very much worth reading.”

—David Wojahn

In Confidence

In Confidence is Jim Tilley's first book of poems, ranging from lyric to narrative in form. About half of the 60 poems are open-form sonnets, most of which fit a broad theme of personal and societal "dislocation." The collection covers a variety of subjects, from relationships to issues of politics, the economy, and the environment. Several of the poems are presented in pairs with the same underlying setting or situation but with markedly different development, exhibiting a kind of "quantum" picture with both states existing at the same time, not surprising since the poet was formerly a physicist. The subtly crafted verses of In Confidence resonate with universal human qualities.

Los Angeles Independent Publishing

New Poems

Red Hen Press, a Los Angeles independent publisher founded by Kate Gale, is the place for new poems, new fiction, and lesbian fiction/lesbian books.